By Shyam Saran
Most summit-level visits are carefully planned and orchestrated months in advance with a list of “deliverables” worked through tortuous negotiations and packaged for eventual display during the main event. One such high-profile encounter having taken place already when Prime Minister Modi visited Washington in September last year, what could conceivably be delivered just four months later in yet another India-US summit and that too, attended by all the drama and pageantry of India’s Republic Day? This is a summit decided upon by the principals themselves with their bureaucracies scrambling to catch up and generate substance from spectacle.
In fact the impending summit has already delivered on the expectations of the principals. For Prime Minister Modi, Obama’s appearance as chief guest on India’s Republic Day is a welcome and powerful visual endorsement of his leadership and international stature by the chief international honcho, frayed at the edges perhaps but still radiating the aura of a long standing global superpower. For a recent entrant to a somewhat crowded international stage, this is important.
It is also a poke in the eye of troublesome Pakistan next door which is now beginning to feel like an abandoned waif. First the president of all weather ally, China, gives Islamabad a pass while being feted in India by Modi and now President of Frenemy, the US, too, takes a deliberate detour and tops it by warning Pakistan of unmentionable consequences if any cross-border misdemeanours are indulged in during the visit.
The Republic Day honour is reserved for special friends and now the US is clearly in that category. The ambivalence of previous Indian political dispensations concerning ties with the US has been clearly and deliberately overcome. Even if substantive outcomes of the visit are sparse, the visit in itself constitutes a powerful message opening up greater diplomatic space for India both regionally and globally. This will be important in managing the relationship with an increasingly assertive China.
What is in it for Obama? In a word, legacy. Here is a president whose eight-year term is already being branded as a disappointment by his supporters and a disaster by his opponents. This is unfair. He has presided over a remarkable recovery of the American economy from the depths of an unprecedented financial and economic crisis. Under him, the US has re-emerged as an energy superpower. He will probably deliver an Iranian nuclear deal which may change the geopolitics of the Gulf and West Asia dramatically. The US has remained safe from terrorist attacks even as the vulnerabilities of other democracies are increasingly and worryingly exposed.
And he has avoided confrontation with China though his missteps on Ukraine and Russia have handed the Chinese a welcome geopolitical card. And yet despite this rather creditable record, Obama has some of the lowest popularity rankings of a second-term president and is in danger of leaving behind a tattered legacy. In this bleak landscape, the India story is an uplifting one. In a deeply partisan and polarised US polity, closer relations with India enjoy bipartisan consensus. With the Republic Day invitation he can justifiably claim to have pitched India-US relations to unprecedented heights overcoming the mutual ambivalence of the past and even Modi’s own bitter experience as target of an insulting visa denial. For him too the deliverables that are being feverishly worked on by officials on both sides will be the icing on the cake. The visit in itself is the real cake.
So does this mean that the forthcoming visit will be more about optics and not about substance? The utility of summits is that they concentrate the minds of the officials who are in charge of delivering outcomes. It was the impending visit of the then prime minister Manmohan Singh to Washington in April 2005 which compelled the rather fractious negotiators to reach last-minute compromises on the joint statement relating to the civil nuclear deal. Seemingly insuperable odds were overcome on the Separation Plan for firewalling India’s civilian nuclear sector from its strategic programme just on the eve of President George W. Bush’s visit to Delhi in March 2006. It may well be that the Obama visit will finally see a solution to the civil nuclear liability issue through some creative work-a-rounds such as an insurance pool. If as a result both Westinghouse and General Electric are able to announce joint projects with the Nuclear Power Corporation of India, then a major and festering complaint of the US would have been addressed. This will result in two other important gains for India. The proposed India-Japan civil nuclear agreement has essentially been stalled by Tokyo at the US’s behest. This could go forward quickly if the liability issue is resolved with the US. We may also see greater US activism on its declared support to India’s membership of the four international control regimes viz. the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), the Wassenar Group and the Australia Group. The membership of these regimes will finally put India in the category of technologically advanced nations that adhere to strict export control measures for sensitive technologies but trade freely in them amongst themselves.
It is likely that the two sides will conclude a new Defence Cooperation Framework Agreement to replace the very first such agreement concluded in 2005. The latter had been controversial but proved to be the basis for an unprecedented growth in bilateral military-to-military relations and, more surprisingly, in defence hardware relations. Virtually no one would have predicted in 2005 that India, 10 years later, would have bought over $10 billion worth of weapons from the US and that much of India’s transport fleet would consist of American aircraft. Unlike the controversy that attended the conclusion of the first agreement, there is a positive expectation from its successor. This reflects how far the two countries have travelled together even in a sensitive area. With the changes brought about in India’s defence acquisition policies and the emphasis on building a high quality and sophisticated defence industry, the US is likely to emerge as the most important defence partner for India. Under the Defence Trade and Technology Initiative, pioneered by the then US deputy secretary for defence and now defence secretary nominee, Ashton Carter, there could be a number of technologically advanced platforms the two countries could work on. Carter’s return to the Obama administration in this critically important office is good news because he made significant efforts to smoothen the way for enhanced defence cooperation with India.
As with defence, the other area where cooperation between the two countries has grown significantly is counter-terrorism and intelligence cooperation. This is likely to strengthen further given the expected fallout from the political and security transition in Afghanistan and the growing threat from ISIS spreading outwards from the Gulf. It is likely that the two sides will name some Pakistan-based and India-specific terrorist groups explicitly as targets of their counter-terrorism cooperation.
Climate change has been identified as an important item on the summit agenda. On the sidelines of the APEC summit held in Beijing in November last year, the US and Chinese presidents reached an understanding on climate change which has been hailed as a significant contribution to the forthcoming Climate Summit in Paris later this year. China agreed to peak its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 while the US would reduce its own emissions by 26-28 per cent from the 2005 level. In terms of what the challenge of global climate change requires, this is a very weak effort by the two largest emitters since their per capita emissions will likely converge at about 12 to 14 tonnes per capita of carbon emissions. India’s current per capita emission in contrast is less than two tonnes. It is, therefore, somewhat strange that India is being asked to emulate what the Chinese have done and announce a similar deal with the US during the forthcoming visit. There is simply no comparison between India and China in this respect. It would be far better for the two sides to announce ambitious joint programmes for renewable energy, such as solar and wind energy, and for enhancing energy efficiency which would help India pursue a path of sustainable development. If the US could include India in the list of countries to which gas from the US could be exported freely, this too would help India increase the proportion of a relatively cleaner fuel in its energy mix.
If the Indian economy regains a higher growth trajectory and some of the onerous regulatory and fiscal hurdles are removed, then the sheer scale of the economic opportunities that India will offer to the US and other foreign investors will smoothen some of the persistent controversies that have plagued India-US trade relations. The key message will not be from PM Modi himself though that will be important. The US and other foreign investors will want to see whether the new government’s policies and their implementation carry credibility with Indian businesses. I recall that in 1991-92, it was Indian business which was instrumental in convincing foreign businesses that Narasimha Rao’s economic reforms and liberalisation were for real. If Indian businesses begin to invest in a big way at home, the foreign investor will follow. It is for this reason that one hopes the government will not be in a hurry to make concessions on issues such as intellectual property and investment protection in an unnecessary effort to add to the success of the visit. The visit has been successful already. One must resist the temptation to sacrifice substance for sentiment.
Shyam Saran is a former foreign secretary and was, until recently, chairman of the National Security Advisory Board